Anticipated Results

by Dennis E. Bolen

  Still we proceeded.

  I came—reflexes gripping—hollering a bit. Not inspired. Mostly by habit.

  Wei mimicked my sound, almost giggling. Having begun to feel near alone in the bed I was thankful for at least this slight demonstration. Even if it was puzzling. Was she ridiculing my western way of verbalizing a joyous sex-blast? Or was she still thinking about the cat? I know I was.

  I drew back onto all fours and rested my head on hers, trying not to breathe too heavily. Then I looked at her. Her smile was slightly beyond slight but her eyes were serious. It occurred to me that, where I was naked in the physical sense, this was just a state of merely being bare of clothing. But by Wei’s conspicuous discernment, my nakedness of character was now a terrible exposure. Her expression transmitted concisely—stern brow, pursed lips—that I had not measured up. I rolled off.

  Wei sighed.

  I probed her lower region with limbered fingers, looking to work through to the end. She brushed me away.

  “It okay.”

  “I want to.”

  “I not.”

  I ranged below, tongue at the ready.

  “Stop!” She swatted me.

  I lay back on the pillows with an arm folded behind my head.

  Wei sighed again. “It okay.” She took my willing hand in hers and met my eyes. “Nice.”

  We lay breathing. Silent minutes passed.

  Wei shifted and I knew she would be seeking her panties. Dressing. Leaving. This she did silently. Still faintly smiling as we kissed at the door.

  •

  I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate, perhaps due to the residual Wei-scent in the bed. I turned off the light. Despite the post-sex calm I could not navigate a drift toward sleep, but entered a daydream.

  The cat.

  That morning.

  Darting under my bed.

  I snapped to. Could she still be under there? I turned the light back on.

  This time I took a couple of breaths, planted my feet, and heaved with sufficient force to raise the bed high enough so I could fully inspect underneath. Although the light, as it reached to the far wall, was dim with the density of airborne dust, somewhere in the mustiness I noted movement. Then a pair of unmistakable spooky luminescent eyes. As my eyes adjusted I could see the cat coiled, mired in great grappling bunnies of hair-infused dust. She glared out from there with a riveting malevolence.

  Cats are great at that, giving you a withering look. I admire them for it. She was flinging me a good one. A killer gaze of distilled feral malignancy. Gone was her earlier passive oblivion, her casual non-caring when she had been the awake one, the standing and alert one. Now there was a definite fire of betrayal in her pose. All this and she certainly wasn’t moving.

  “C’mon, kitty.” I gestured with my head toward the window. “Get going, you crazy cat.”

  She just stared at me. Green eyes hardening dark toward blackness. My arms were getting tired. I lowered the bed back down, finally sleepy. The kitty had looked about to rush off. I surmised it probably would once things were quiet. I drifted off, at least semi-convinced that things would resolve themselves in the night.

  •

  Morning came so soon that I had to bolt into the street like a desperado. I lucked onto a bus and was at the office just in time to overwork enough to compensate for being late.

  That evening before dinner, Wei and I paused at my place to have a drink. I poured her a glass of Pinot blanc. She sat cross-legged on the futon watching me do a quick wardrobe change. At the restaurant, she got a call from her other job and we cabbed across town so I could see her off. She moonlighted at a busy sushi place, one of those cheap barns that makes its profit on volume. I admired her industry. She was made of tough stuff when it came to work. But I was more than a little miffed at the interruption. Plus, she was freely participating in one of the most ubiquitous North American culinary frauds: a Japanese restaurant staffed and run entirely by Chinese.

  I went home steeped in ambivalence. Despite the resident doubt I had about any kind of legitimacy between Wei and me, I was nevertheless disappointed that the date had not ended in bed. At the same time I knew that such an outcome would have been another empty gesture—the rote performance of a tired funster’s ritual—a tepid carnal process embarrassing in its pointlessness.

  I showered, dived into the sack, and New Yorker-surfed for a solid two hours, hoping to lull myself to sleep. But after a stilted evening of fractured Wei communication and my splintered word structures, I still could not sleep for all the confusion, the mental rehash, the compulsive considering of things. I turned. Tossed. Developed a hard-on and ruminated it away. Eventually I settled on thoughts of the cat. That felis catus, that Sylvestris of my daydreams.

  What about that felis, anyway? It had to be gone by now.

  Thoughts of whiskers and fur made me wide-eyed. I worked at banishing the images. A yawn enveloped me and sleep approached.

  But it was like being on the edge of urination—not knowing whether you could make it to the next town, through the whole movie, to the morning without getting up.

  I knew I would be fighting myself all night if I didn’t check things out, so I flung back the covers, flicked the bedside light on, and straightened to a standing position. Deep breath. I heaved the futon and frame and the down quilt and all the pillows so high that I could easily survey all that was below me.

  “Kitty! What the hell are you still doing here?”

  “Maw …”

  Impulsively I increased my lift and carefully leaned the whole bedworks over against the wall. Gently. So as not to harm the cat crouching livid among the fluff balls, her palpably hateful look undiminished from the night before.

  But her glare did not affect me as much this time because in the one word she had spoken I had clearly heard a piteous note. A certain lack of lustre in her eyes spoke of fatigue and dehydration. I understood that it was a damn good thing I had checked on her and I would be doing her the greatest service in setting things finally right. I moved in slowly, noting with surprise that there was no odour of urine, no fecal nuggets, no disorder at all aside from a demarcated spot cleared amid the grunge. I touched her. She did not recoil. She let me get two hands on her and lift.

  I walked us across the big empty room to the window, monitoring with pity the racy heartbeat in my fingers. I oddly kept thinking of Wei and me and how silly, silly, silly … Then I was letting the cat go, setting her well across the sill so that she could easily duck under the window and out.

  And indeed, once afoot she did not break pace but continued on her own. Having gone without water or food for two days and being confined in a space not larger than a shoe box and having endured overhead the creaks and rockings of human concourse, the kitty fled away stiff-tailed and did not look back to me even once, not even in a dream.

  Clean or Dirty?

  Lena hates to drive in the big city.

  She barely tolerates the relative straight line to and from my place. Over the years, she has all but gone subliminal with the route in her head. She depends upon its unchanging intersections, lights, one-way streets, and parking opportunities for mental structure. Any deviation etches trouble-lines across her forehead.

  Nevertheless, I drop the notion: “So. When you’re heading out, I’ll just catch a ride to the gym.”

  “Da-ad.” She frowns. “I’m not going all the way over there.”

  “What? It’s not that far off course.”

  “No.”

  “Okay … Maybe just a lift for part of the way.”

  Lena’s forehead de-wrinkles slightly, but despite the fact that she herself is a resident of a hectic city—albeit a smaller one than mine—and notwithstanding her fine motor skills and the splendid calibre of her car, I can see in her face and hear by the silence-enhanced ticking of the hall clock that the ban on my getting a lift remains.

  But I cannot surrender: “Oh, for crying out loud. You can find your way easy.
”

  “Dad. It’s more complicated than that.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I don’t want to get lost.”

  “You can’t get lost. It’s so simple. You just drop me off. Take a right. Another right. Go three blocks. Take a left and there you are.”

  “I’m already confused.”

  “Oh, okay. I’ll just jump out at the corner. From there you turn right and go straight all the way and you don’t have to turn again until you get to the freeway.”

  We sit at the breakfast table where we have just eaten her most oft-requested breakfast: rolled pancakes. She never misses an opportunity when visiting me or my mother to have them cooked for her. I cannot remember if I have ever explained to her my theory of the ancestral significance in her preference for them. They are a thicker kind of crêpe—I want to explain—a hearty, agrarian-class, sugar-bearing relative to the elegant French item you can buy on any street corner in Paris. They represent in flour and egg and butter the blunter genealogy of our Teutonic strain; the brooding tempers, obstinacy, husky physiques, and entrenched philosophies. It would be sweet, I think now—the morning of her departure from a holiday break, the last few minutes of a rare and precious togetherness—for us to be speaking of this. But I can tell by the quiet growing between us that the subject, for her, has turned more serious than food or heritage.

  I speak to her as she stares ahead. “But you’re such a good driver.”

  “I don’t care. It’s just so obnoxious around here.”

  “I thought you didn’t mind it so much.”

  “Sometimes. But nowadays mostly I hate it.”

  “You hate it.”

  “It’s so cold. It’s too fast and ugly. It bugs me.”

  “Well. In that case I feel doubly honoured you’re visiting me. But I hate to think you have to endure the urban terrors just to do that.”

  “Daddy, don’t exaggerate. You’re just bugging me more.”

  •

  The thing is that we’d already had this conversation the evening before, strolling on our way to see a movie. Her words came as we stepped around a panhandler and girded our eardrums against the blare of an ambulance: “I hate this place!” She had to call it out, nearly attracting attention.

  Nevertheless, I didn’t quite hear her. “What? You hate this pace?”

  “Hate this place.”

  “Hmm.” The noise had died enough for us to speak in civil tones. “Define ‘this place’.”

  “Here.”

  “Here … here? You mean earth? British Columbia? Or do you mean figuratively? Your general phase of life? State of mind? Or just Granville and Broadway?”

  “This city.”

  “Oh. Well. I don’t know what to say to that. I mean. Look at this neighbourhood. The choicest bistros. Espresso joints. Live theatre. Bars with jazz playing in them. The west side’s best two-dollar pizza slice. Cheap kitchen supplies. A big-box bookstore. A greasy-spoon that serves chow mein-flavoured burgers and burger-flavoured chow mein. What more could you want?”

  “I don’t know …” She rolled her eyes and I knew I’d gone too far and too wild, naming off things I liked and she wasn’t interested in. “It’s just not home.”

  “Of course it isn’t. Not yours. Not for more than twenty years. Not since you were one-and-a-half.”

  I certainly wished it felt at least a little like home to her. It is this yearning that weighs in my mind as we finish our crêpes. It is a thing of which we have scantly spoken down the visitation decades, through all the concentrated holiday celebrations, letters and calls and emails, and meticulously planned and executed summer fun-times. For me there would always be a permanent obligation—unstated but nonetheless mandatory—as real as the sugar and cinnamon left dusted upon our plates and the coffee puddles thickening at the bottoms of our cups. Thus I offer: “How is your mother?”

  “Oh, fine.”

  “Rich and getting richer?”

  “Well, she doesn’t spend.”

  “Still acidic and nasty about anything out of the ordinary?”

  “I’m trying to break her of it, but it’s tough.”

  “Still afraid to go anywhere?”

  “Yup.”

  “She gets it from her mother.”

  “I guess.”

  “And you get it from them.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I can remember. Your Nanny was a white-knuckler for anything but a bus. She could relax on a bus, especially those booze-runs down to Reno she and your Grampa used to take. They did so many, he got tired of the two-day-down, two-day-back thing and got her onto an airplane. It only happened once. Apparently she sat staring straight ahead and cutting off the circulation in the poor guy’s arm. I picked them up at the airport. She was damn near catatonic.”

  “Well, she doesn’t go anymore.”

  “There are casinos all over the place, nowadays.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence. I sigh within it. “Are you feeling okay about everything?”

  “Daddy, that’s a strange question.”

  “I’m sorry. But you seem almost kind of testy.”

  “It’s still morning.”

  I look at a clock. Ten after eleven. “Oh, that’s right …” Both Lena and her mother are notorious post-waking crab-heads. Although the hour is respectably close to noon, I know I am pushing the non-morning-person boundary.

  We both sigh. I struggle to keep away from the sadness I still suffer over one year when she didn’t show up for the holidays at all and even rebuffed all my attempts to speak to her via telephone or email or writing. Then my call from a season’s repose in Europe—“Come to Venice. We can paddle around together”—to which she replied, “Why, are you lonely or something?” For years she projected disenchantment without explanation. It wasn’t exactly school, she said when pressed, though a recent flagging of enthusiasm was vexing her. It wasn’t relationships; she was a veteran by now. Work was fine but blah. It was just everything. Eventually she confessed to having sought psychiatric help. The spirit of our reassembly since my self-imposed exile overseas had materialized—if only thus—inside a laughing narration of how she had flushed her Prozac down the toilet. The one pill she had taken causing a dizzy head but also a lucidity of resolve to open her life back up to its available alternatives: revised plans for school, quitting her job, a new boyfriend.

  “Is your stuff all packed?”

  “Almost.” Lena stands, plate in hand. “Does the dishwasher have dirty or clean?”

  “Never mind. I’ll get it later.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll get my workout stuff.”

  Her sigh is audible.

  As we bustle about there is too the detectable stoniness; her subtle, muffled bristling. I work through the fear in my scalp, collect my gym bag, and don the remedial exercise shoes designed to stave off an advancing case of pronation.

  We trundle out to the sidewalk and stand before her metallic blue roadster parked perfectly before my townhouse door on the car-crowded street. We’d worked well together the day before: scouting the spot, me invigilating as a slow-packing family strapped in two toddlers and ponderously swung their minivan into traffic. Then standing pylon duty while Lena fetched the car—which we’d had to park blocks away—and steered it home amidst the desperate Saturday shopping and theatre parkers.

  We pause at the curb. I note that we are both admiring the parking spot. Then we catch each other doing it and our mutual shamelessness becomes gravitational. We step close to each other, swinging our bags and smiling.

  “Hey that was some teamwork, huh?”

  “If you say so, Dad.”

  “What? You think getting a prime spot in front of my place is some kind of casual offering? Like it happens every day? Sweetheart, we can go weeks without a space here. And there we were stumbling on it simple as a prize at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box. Makes me almost want to be
religious. It was positively provident.”

  Lena rolls her eyes and once again I know I’ve ventured too far from normalcy for her taste. She tenders her keychain and chirps the doors unlocked. I fight myself to remain silent at the outrage of creating needless noise in an already dinning cityscape. Besides, my admonitions to her have long been grudgingly recorded and always rebuffed.

  We open our respective sides and load the back seat. The car is shiny and spotless. We take our seats. From my leather sinecure I admire the luminous curves from the undulant hood forward, down and away.

  Lena starts the engine and lets it run. Her hand and arm seem independent, palming a caress over the gearshift and letting the emergency brake free in a deliberate, economical operation. Everything in her movements testifies to her attachment to this machine. Her eyes protectively scan the rear and side-view mirrors, gauging traffic. I calculate Lena’s life in terms of her driving: She’s owned this car for six years, one-quarter her total age. She has always been a responsible child—her mother parenting brilliantly to impart comportment and duty—thus her eagerness to get a driver’s license while still a teen was not for a moment opposed by her parents.

  We ooze out of the treasured spot. Lena calmly performs the left turn against speeding town-bound columns of SUVs and we cruise, her hands firmly upon the wheel. My mind is in neutral, taking the imperative to enjoy every motorized second, each expiring centimetre of transportation in the custody of my precious only child. I become conscious of the deep, cushioned seat beneath me. It is all-encompassing and warm. I avoid watching my darling drive because, in this kind of mood, I am known to get misty. Lena loathes it when I get misty. I do not wish to introduce distaste of any sort into this perfection of a moment.

  But then, in only six blocks, it is over. Lena pulls her sleek auto snugly to the curb and we turn to each other.